French conservative party Les Républicains has sacked its vice president Guillaume Peltier after he made sympathetic remarks about the presidential candidacy of the writer and pundit Eric Zemmour.
Peltier wrote on Twitter in response to the first campaign rally held by Zemmour over the weekend in Villepinte: “How could I remain unmoved by Eric Zennour’s speech for France?”
“There is a single opponent: Emmanuel Macron. A single objective: to repair France. There is only one way: to unite all the voters of the right, with Les Républicains,” he added, implying an ideological alignment with the populist.
Agnès Evren, another vice president of Les Républicains, reacted to Peltier’s comments, saying, according to FranceInfo: “Your words have no connection to our political family in any way. Eric Zemmour’s speech is a thousand places away from our values.”
Les Républicains president Christian Jacob announced Tuesday that he would be removing Peltier from his post as vice president, as well as the mayor of Saint-Etienne Gaël Perdriau, who said he would not vote for the party’s presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse, who was selected last weekend.
Prior to his speech to a hall of at least 10,000 people, Zemmour had been attacked by a man who attempted to grab his neck. The incident was just one of several disruptions, and organisers say that far-left Antifa extremists had even attempted to bring Molotov cocktails to the event.
During his first campaign rally, Eric Zemmour also announced the formation of a new political party dubbed Reconquest, a possible reference to the Reconquista of Spain which saw Christians drive Muslim rulers from the Iberian peninsula over the course of several hundred years.
Zemmour, who surged in French presidential elections polling prior to his formal announcement for president last week, is firmly against mass migration and demographic shifts and has mentioned the “Great Replacement” theory several times in the past.
“You have not moved and yet you have the feeling of no longer being at home. You feel like a stranger in your country. You are exiles from within,” said in his campaign announcement video and added: “the third-worldisation of our people and our country impoverishes them as much as it dislocates them.”
Recent polls had put Zemmour in close competition to populist National Rally leader Marine Le Pen for second place in the first round of the French presidential elections behind current President Emmanuel Macron. But since the selection of Ms Pécresse by Les Républicains, he has become tied for third in a Harris Interactive poll released this week.
Under the French presidential system, the two leading candidates in the first round face off in a second-round vote to determine the next French head of state.
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